July 3, 2007 (Port Alberni, BC) – The profile for Monday’s leg of the B.C. Bike Race: The Pacific Traverse resembled a Richter scale graph before and after an earthquake. For 70-plus kilometers everything was reasonably calm, as riders rolled up and down along the logging roads that helped bridge the 118km Stage 2 gap between Lake Cowichan and Port Alberni. You must be logged in to post a comment.
Then the rumbling “” or in this case climbing “” commenced, as profile and riders rapidly ascended skyward to the Duck Lake summit. Depending on who you asked among the race’s 180 riders, the 700-meter logging road/loose doubletrack climb was mean, cruel, inhuman or simply very steep. But no matter what they said about the trip up, the ride down was a smile-inducing good time.
“You could ride most of the climb,” said Marc Driver, a 45-year-old carpenter from Ketchum, Idaho. “But at the top it was so steep it wasn’t worth pedaling anymore. You could walk just as fast as you could ride. The ride down made it worthwhile, though. That was fun.”
Jim Bennett, a 43-year-old real estate developed from North Vancouver gave a similar assessment, admitting to “a fair amount of granny gear time” on the climb before calling it “the best day I’ve ever had on a bike. I felt good all day. It really wasn’t as bad as the profile made you think it was going to be and the singletrack at the end was awesome.”
At the front end of the race, it was Trek-Volkswagen teammates Chris Eatough and Jeff Schalk making it 2-for-2 at the B.C. Bike Race, taking a convincing stage win and increasing their overall lead in the seven-day event that finishes next Saturday in Whistler.
The American east coasters now own two stage wins and a 6:02 advantage in the GC, with North Vancouver teammates Andreas Hestler and Kevin Calhoun (Rocky-Mountain-Haywood Securities) again settling for second place.
Eatough and Schalk finished in 4:34:06, with Hestler/Calhoun trailing in at 5:58. Evan Plews and Bear Perrin (Capitol Subaru Cycling) were third on the stage, but didn’t make up enough time on the duo of Manuel Prado and Jason First (La Ruta de los Conquistadores), who remained in third overall, 45:46 behind Eatough/Schalk.
Not surprisingly, the difference maker was the Duck Lake ascent, which put Calhoun in a hole he couldn’t climb out of.
“Kevin had a moment,” explained Hestler, who helped design the B.C. Bike Race course and is the event’s spokesman. “He was running a little low on sugar, and that was a bad place to be low on anything.”
There was no change at the top of the standings in any of the other two-rider categories, where teammates must stay within two minutes of each other or be hit with a time penalty.
Cynthia Young and Michelle Newton (Shore Girls Don’t Cry) took their second stage win and continue to lead the women’s overall. It’s been a serendipitous pairing, considering Young and Newton originally signed up with different partners and only hooked up after their original teammates bailed out.
“We have some mutual friends, but we’ve only known each other for about three months,” explained North Vancouver’s Young, whose regular 9-to-5 job is mothering her two-year-old son.
David Harris and Lynda Wallenfels (Team Desert Cyclery/HealthFX) in open mixed; Randy Richmond and Sandy Mitchell (Gerick-Nelson) in veterans 80-plus; and Doug Nottebrock and Con Diamond (Kootenay-Okanagan Cooperative) in veterans 100-plus also all pulled out back-to-back stage wins and remained tops in their respective categories.
Tuesday’s Stage 3 is an 82.5km northwesterly run from Port Alberni to Cumberland. After a rolling on logging roads for the first two-thirds of the stage, the course heads into the famed technical singletrack of the Cumberland area. Among the trails on the menu is Bucket of Blood, named after a pub from Cumberland’s early mining days.
“[Monday] was a little like a TransAlps stage, with lots of time on the road and some really steep climbing,” explained Hestler, who helped design the B.C. Bike Race course. “But [Tuesday] people get to experience some best singletrack on Vancouver Island. It’s going to be a good time.”
Those good times will include trails such as Soggy Biscuit, Matt’s Trail, Black Hole and Space Nugget.
The arrival in Cumberland will conclude the three-day, northwest journey on Vancouver Island. Stage 4 begins with a ferry ride across the Strait of Georgia to British Columbia’s scenic Sunshine Coast where more singletrack awaits.
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